Entertainment

MapQuest Releases New Homepage, Promises More

MapQuest today launched its new homepage design that aims at reducing the amount of time you spend surfing through the site's pages and keeps you doing more of what you want.

According to the company's Vice President of product development, Mark Law, MapQuest has received countless messages from users asking execs to revamp the site and make it a more useful tool for getting work done quickly and efficiently. And in order to do so, MapQuest's latest design (which, right now, mostly impacts the homepage) tries to take the site from a "directions and map service" to a "location-centric" service that provides mapping and directions.

The improved MapQuest homepage now features a map that displays the location you input into the box above it. MapQuest said that most of its users — about 48 million unique — simply didn't want to move from page to page when searching on a map and it decided to make the front page the place to get practically everything.

Included in that map, the new MapQuest homepage will allow you to get gas prices and see where construction is going on in a cleaner interface than before. On top of that, it will feature a Weather section and available live cams (in certain cities) to show you what's happening on the ground.

MapQuest is also using its AOL ownership and will now display different AOL properties at the bottom of the page, like City Guide, which lets you search for point of interest and practically anything else in the city you're viewing.

More importantly, MapQuest is using the bottom of the page to see if users want the information to be included in the maps. Want to find the best burger in New York with City Guide on MapQuest maps? If so, tell the company that you want to do it and if enough people agree, it'll integrate that into the maps.

MapQuest claims getting directions will be easier too. Instead of offering two search boxes like it does now, the new MapQuest homepage will leave the directions box "greyed out" until you decide to search for directions. Once you do, it'll work just as it does now.

I had the opportunity to see the new MapQuest homepage in action and it does look much cleaner and generally more useful than its predecessor. That said, I don't know if it's really enough to make Google Maps users switch and MapQuest was quick to note that this is just the beginning of much more to come.

The company wouldn't tell me any more than that, but as more of its pages are revamped and it improves its offerings, it'll be interesting to see what will come of it.

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